Dodo to trial Optus femtocell for home 3G

Summary:Optus wholesale customers Virgin, iiNet, Primus and Dodo are not included in the Optus trial of femtocell devices to boost 3G services in their home, but Dodo will soon be conducting an internal trial of the device, the company has revealed.

Optus wholesale customers Virgin, iiNet, Primus and Dodo are not included in the Optus trial of femtocell devices to boost 3G services in their home, but Dodo will soon be conducting an internal trial of the device, the company has revealed.

(Credit: Dodo)

The Alcatel-Lucent device branded as the Optus Home Zone supplements poor 3G coverage in the home with a customers' own fixed-line broadband service, allowing devices to make phone calls and use internet services through the femtocell device. Optus announced on Monday that it is initially trialling the device in Sydney, Wollongong, Brisbane and the Gold Coast, with the Home Zone sold at selected Optus retail outlets.

Optus today said that it will not immediately be making the product available to its wholesale mobile phone service providers.

"At this stage the Femtocell pilot is only for Optus Consumer and [small to medium business] customers," Optus told ZDNet Australia.

However, Dodo CEO Larry Kestelman confirmed to ZDNet Australia that his company had been in talks with Optus about providing the product sometime in the future.

"We're talking to Optus about it, we're about to start a trial of our own with the product, so we fully intend to have the product through Optus," Kestelman said, adding that he wanted to test the product first before offering it to customers. "Just to make sure that we're happy with the product and we understand the workings of it."

Kestelman said that the prospect of boosting voice coverage to the home was more important than offsetting data usage back from Optus' wholesale network onto his own fixed-line network.

"Ultimately the data part of it is not a huge amount of traffic," he said. "As we all know, the coverage of mobiles in the house can be pretty patchy at best which is why I'm excited by the product."

Optus' other wholesale customers iiNet, Virgin and Primus had not responded to requests for comment at the time of writing.